Page 46 of Fearless
“You’re in luck,” he said. “It’ll cost a helluva lot more, takes two extra flight changes and the first plane won’t leave for another two hours, but it’s half the layover time if you go to France first, then Canada, and then Washington. You’ll actually land within half an hour of her.”
If he hadn’t been to China recently and still had his passport in his truck, he couldn’t have done it. If he didn’t have a cousin willing to drop everything and run to his bank in Cooktown, transferring over enough money from his account into Noah’s, he wouldn’t have been able to do it either. Fortunately, Noah had both, although the loan did cost him a leather jacket and the use of his boat.
“If you get drunk and crash it, you’re a dead man,” Noah promised him.
“Bring me home a swanky American girl,” his cousin brightly returned. “I like red heads.”
And back around the world Noah went, not for the purposes of rest and vacation, but for the first time in his life because he was chasing a woman. He didn’t even know why.
By the time his plane touched down in Washington D.C., the shock of Kitty’s actions had worn off. Now Noah was pissed, partly with himself because he really couldn’t afford to do this, and partly with her, because money and affordability aside, he couldn’t bring himself not to follow her. All he’d wanted was one month, and she’d agreed to that. So, what the hell? Why would she leave? He was determined to find out and to keep his temper firmly under control until he did, and then when it was over and done and he’d given her a piece of his mind, then he’d probably just go home.
Yeah, who was he kidding? He’d never wanted to paddle a woman so hard in all his life. The whole trek from the plane to the car rental counter, it was all he could think about. He didn’t have anything with him, but that was okay. He had his belt, he had his hand, and if push came to shove, he was pretty sure he could find a switch to cut even in the States’ capital.
As if it would come to that. He’d never struck a woman in anger and he wasn’t going to start now. He also never spanked for punishment, but in Kitty’s case, he was sorely tempted to make this the exception. She deserved it for running back to Ethen alone!
He just couldn’t understand it. And yeah, he wasn’t thinking straight right now, and yeah, the way his palm kept itching made him wary about trusting his instincts, but if he did nothing else, he wasn’t leaving until Kitty was away from that abusive son of a bitch.
“How long will you need the car?” the lady at the counter asked as she entered the information from his International Driving Permit into her computer.
Noah held up one finger. He honestly didn’t know how long it would take. An hour to track down Ethen’s house, five, maybe ten minutes to storm the place and throw Kitty back in the car, another hour to drive to Garreth’s where she’d be safe. He rolled his shoulders. From everyone but him, that is.
“One day rental,” she said, more to herself as she finished registering him. “Let’s see what we’ve got…”
“You got one with GPS?” That would make finding Ethen’s house and then Garreth’s afterward much easier. Once he got Kitty in the car, he was going to have enough to do scolding—paddling—and talking sense into her—shake her until her eyeteeth rattled; Ethen? Seriously? What the hell, love?—he didn’t need the added aggravation of also having to street-map his way around a foreign city.
“We can do that,” the lady behind the counter said brightly, and soon Noah was heading for the highway in a relatively new business special with excellent gas mileage and an onboard GPS, stammering out directions to Ethen’s house in a spot-on imitation of Porky Pig.
The farther out of town he went, the more Kitty’s initial reaction to his house began to make sense. Ethen’s home was every bit as remote as Noah’s, and though he’d not been out this way the last time he was in D.C., Garreth had told him about that midnight run when he’d gone to rescue Hadlee. He’d told him about Kitty’s rescue too. As Noah drove, certain gut-churning details kept popping into his head.
There was no mistaking the abandoned gas station when he passed it. Not with the bones of old gas pumps protruding from the concrete, its lot grown over by weeds, and that graffiti-tagged phonebooth in the corner. Wadded trash littered the bottom, and for the next several kilometers all Noah could think about was a broken, battered Kitty walking this country road in the black of an icy night, without clothes, without shoes, only to end up huddled in the bottom of that phonebooth with nothing but a layer of garbage to keep her warm. For four kilometers he thought about it, his grip strangling the steering wheel, his jaw locked so tight it made his teeth ache.
For all that it was dark as pitch out here, he found Ethen’s wooded driveway. It wasn’t half as long and winding as Noah’s back home, but it was unpaved and as full of weather ruts, none of which stopped him from speeding down it a good ten kilometers faster than he should. It must have rained earlier in the day. The ground was muddy and he slid when he braked, mud splattering the side of the house and only missing ramming the porch by a fender-width.
A tall blonde woman peeked out the kitchen window when Noah slammed out of the car. She was naked, not that he cared. Up until that moment, he thought he was doing rather well at keeping his temper in check, but as they stared at one another, his rapidly darkening mood must have shown itself. Her mouth moved in a whispered curse he didn’t need to hear to recognize.
Oh shit didn’t half cover it.
The woman bolted for the front door, getting there ahead of Noah barely in time to lock it. She leapt back wildly though when he reared back and kicked it in. Wood splintered and glass in two of the six old-fashioned frames shattered as the door slammed into the opposing the wall.
The blonde slapped both hands over her mouth, but otherwise didn’t make a sound.
“Where is she?” Noah growled, and from the more brightly lit living room, where all he could see was the form of a woman hunched inside a dog kennel, came a man’s, “What the hell was that?”
Noah had thought he was keeping his temper under control. Right up until Ethen ventured out of the living room and the two men saw one another. After that, all Noah saw was red.
“Who are you?” Ethen said, a half second before recognition lit and his eyes widened. “Pony-girl, call the police.”
But Noah had already closed the half dozen steps between them. His balled fist knocked Ethen sprawling backwards to the accompanying screams of two horrified women.
Grabbing his nose, Ethen rolled on his back.
Stepping over him, Noah had the padlock on the dog kennel in his hand before he realized the woman staring wide-eyed back at him through the wire door was not Kitty. She had gag cuts at the corners of her mouth and fading impact bruises across her shoulders, hips and ass. She looked terrified.
She looked terrified of him.
“Where’s Kitty?” he asked her.
Shaking her head, the woman shrank as far from him as the back of her kennel would allow.
